an undercurrent of fear

A long time ago, at WCJ, we went to a meeting and were told that the agency had agreed to let in CBC's media show Undercurrents, hosted by Wendy Mesley, so they could show Canada what the people who made "junk mail" were really like. None of our clients would agree to this, of course, so it had been determined that, in order to demonstrate our process, the agency would come up with a DM package for the show itself.

And by agency, they meant Kimberley (art directrix supreme) and I. We'd been chosen as the creative team to be put on display for the cameras, which was at once very flattering and enormously terrifying. Knowing that the crew were kicking around language like "junk mail" for what we did, we were sure it was going to be a hatchet job, against the agency and quite possibly us.

Now, as you'll see from the video, it didn't turn out that badly of course. What did turn out badly was my wardrobe (what the hell was it with vests?) and our ability to look like idiots while we did our jobs.

It's impossible to have a camera hovering over you while you try to do something as freeform and personal as writing. Knowing that the camera would not approve of me sitting and silently typing with headphones on, I began trying to perform the act of writing, which had the result of making me look like a babbling idiot. And believe me, there was worse left on the editing room floor.

But the most terrifying thing, a couple of days before the presentation, was the realization that we had some okay concepts, but nothing that was going to show what we were really capable of. Nothing that, if the show's producers really were out to nail us, would be so smart and self-aware that it might just save us on national TV.

I'd had an idea that I'd shared with Kimberley, but as we talked about it we were both sure it would get us fired – because it would be all about deconstructing how DM manipulates you, the target reader. Not exactly the message I thought WCJ would want to tell the world about our work.

And yet, showing the concepts to Trish the president and Michael the creative director a few days before the on-camera presentation, I knew that they too thought what we'd done was ho-hum. I knew I had to go for the Hail Mary, even if it cost me my job. I gulped and told them about a concept using "This is a blatant attempt to manipulate you" as the OE teaser.

And they loved it. (You never know.)

The rest, as they say, is TV and DM history. Or rather, a very small and very forgotten part of it.

Still, this is one DM package I wish we'd been able to produce; I love it.

NOTE: Watching this, I'm reminded that WCJ had a real Murderer's Row of talent at that time: pretty much everyone in the room is insanely talented and has had a lot of success here in Toronto, in the U.S., or globally. Pretty remarkable.

when an idea is birthed twice

This Globe article about similar ad campaigns for different clients is interesting not because it offers insight into how two agencies can come up with the same idea, but because it can't. Short of defaulting to nasty accusations that would be difficult to prove and would likely be untrue anyway,* how the hell do you explain it?

The interviewees in the article conclude, "Hey, some ideas are just in the air" and the writer of the article doesn't seem to have much of an opinion about it either way.

Now, such a thing has never happened to me, and I can only imagine that the creatives involved are honestly mortified. My personal bias is that these "in the air" ideas tend to be okay ideas that have great or powerful executions – witness putting a "baby on board" sign on a hearse. Chances are, it's work that hasn't really been challenged as thoroughly as it could be, because it's work that could serve equally well for another client in the same category. And to me, a good ad is specific; it says something about that client that no one else can say. Can you imagine Microsoft doing Think Different or Labatt doing The Rant?

Even when it's cool and award-winning, a generalized statement that anyone can say (in other words, a cliché) is still, well...

Which makes me think that, in each case, more work could have been done.

*While individuals can be dumb enough to rip off work to make their portfolios artificially better, no agency or creative director I've ever met would think of doing such a thing, let alone allow it. It would end careers and drive away clients. No one campaign idea is worth that. No single idea is that good.

I probably shouldn't say this out loud

Short post tonight. I'm sitting here with a thick document from our lead information architect, a user experience analysis of a site that we're about to redo. It's a really strong look at the current site's strengths and weaknesses. And it's depressing me, mostly because I don't have the attention span to work through something that thoroughly.

The care and attention that other people take with their jobs, when I'm exposed to it, just amazes the hell out of me. There's so much that has to happen in our business that is hard and detailed work, both before the creative gets to happen, and also to make the creative happen.

I guess it's handy that I'm a writer. Sitting at my desk and typing the words that pop into my head seems so unlike work that I probably shouldn't make it public, lest the people who sign my paycheque get ideas.

why would I ask for a feedbag?

When you get past the experience, the bags under the eyes and the drinking problem, there's another difference between a junior creative and a senior one.

There are a surprising number of juniors who want to hide their work until it's absolutely perfect, before they reluctantly get feedback.

Most the senior creatives I've worked with, and all the good ones I can think of, at a fairly early point in the execution process want feedback on what they're doing. They'll drop by or grab me and talk through the direction they're going, they'll take me through what they have, and where they think it's working or not. They know there's value in getting feedback earlier rather than later, before you've gone down too many blind alleys. Because at an agency, the creative is a process. With clients, account people and production, nothing is finished until it's in the consumer's hands.

Juniors seem to have wait until what they're doing is perfect before they can open up to accept "judgement." (Not that that's what feedback is, I'm just trying to guess at the psychology.) If you're new in a job, I can see how you don't want your boss seeing potential vulnerability. You don't want to be seen as asking for his ideas. You want to come to him with outstanding ideas fully formed, ready to wow clients. And I suppose there's also the tendency not to want to "bother" the creative director with, say, creative. All I can say is bother away. Even when I don't have time, I should make the time. It's my job after all.

I'm not saying you should seek input before you have an idea of where you want to go. I need to see something after all. I just don't want juniors wasting a lot of time on polishing and refining before they know it's the right direction.

Anyway, this impulse to hold things back is not a useful trait, and it's one that we try to discourage by encouraging not formal checkpoints, but informal drop-ins.

I understand the impulse. When I'm writing, I don't want anyone standing over my back, I don't anyone questioning the process I need to go through to get the necessary end result. But once I get the work to a place where my point is clear – and that point is well before I consider it polished, let alone finished – then I do want those other eyeballs. In fact I'll actively bother people until they've given me some sort of feedback, anything so I have a sense that my work is doing what I want it to do.

the bowl which is super, or not

I have to confess that I don't really understand the whole Superbowl ad phenomenon. Obviously any event which exalts the creativity of our product is a good thing. And the buzz can only be good for those of us who toil to make ads which air the other 364 days of the year, right?

Consider the mere build up, the foreplay to the big day. The GoDaddy spot got some 3 million views based on not be allowed to air by CBS. The Focus on the Family spot got acres of coverage for their point of view for weeks before the actual game. After all that, the real live spots can only be brilliant, right? Well, of course not. Apart from the Snickers spot with Betty White and Abe Vigoda, which actually operates on the classical model of having a campaign theme and executing good creative that delivers against it, most of the spots seemed a little sad, like simple embodiments of the brief, or carny sideshow exhibitions, or spots guaranteed to be intertubed around the world... for about five seconds.

In some ways it's a wonderful synergistic model of consumer engagement across multiple media platforms. I know all the arguments about why something this big has to be good for clients. In other ways it's not good that much of the actual value provided by the millions being spent is not found in the TV eyeballs conjured up by the media buy itself, but in the cloud of accompanying hype and discussion and linksharing. How much lasting value are companies getting out of advertising like this? How much real consumer engagement is happening after you view a few of these things? How long until clients try to find ways of getting that kind of hype at a cheaper price?

It all feels somehow, well, wrong. People talk about the spots as a commodity, like race horses or chickens bred for cockfighting. The Betty White spot is well ahead of the field, with the guys staring at the camera spot a distant second and the talking babies lagging well behind...

The only thing that matters is being funny or weird or cute or stupid enough to be passed to your friends. The clients, apart from a few obvious exceptions like Apple with the 1984 spot, get forgotten, their logos and URLs slapped on for the last few seconds as a tip of the cap to the idea that advertising is supposed to convince consumers to feel something, as a means of getting them to buy something.

Update on Sunday, February 14, 2010 at 9:53AM by Scott

Okay, the Google spot is brilliant. Maybe even a little teary, in the way that the first 10 minutes of Up get you. (Or the whole of Thorton Wilder's Our Town. Go see it on stage some time.) Using their core functionality to suggest how two lives come together is really powerful. When we talk about branding in this crazy new modern century of ours, Google is the case study – they built their brand purely through their usefulness to consumers. Kudos to them for bringing that to life in a traditional brand spot.

his name is earl

So, even though it's a completely different business, under completely different circumstances, this is pretty much what's it's like to get feedback about creative from people who aren't creative. Earl Pomerantz is one of those guys who's written a pantload of shows that have made comedy history. (And he's a Toronto boy to boot.) His glimpse of sympathy, maybe even insight, into the lives of the execs he was sitting with and getting feedback from is really what I'm trying to get at in this little blog.

A 19th century German playwright Friedrich Hebbel once pointed us in the right direction. He wrote, "In a good play, everyone is right."

"the committee seems impressed"

For those of us on the inside, this article in today's Toronto Star about creating a public service ad won't hold that much interest. (Except of course the natural narcissistic interest in reading about ourselves.). But it does show a pretty common situation in the process of creating and producing advertising – the client seeing the work, liking it and almost approving it, but then realizing that it's contrary to some of their larger interests.

While I feel for the creatives involved and have been in the same boat many times, I think we on the agency side tend to focus narrowly on the task we're briefed on – we have to in order to get the best work possible. We forget that most of our clients have a wide range of businesses with lots of potential for conflict, and senior approvers who see the work for the first time from totally different perspectives.

Banks are a typical example; I've tried a couple of times pitching concepts for savings accounts that one way or the other implied that credit was bad, forgetting that credit cards are called that for a reason, and are of course a fairly profitable bank product typically run by another division of the bank. Someone on your team has to go through that to know.

On the client side, they tend not to realize that we will run with the brief and strategy wherever it takes us; it's an open-ended process. They don't usually know to think ahead to the needs of senior approvers, because they don't realize that we will almost inevitably transgress into those territories. We'll push things to a black-and-white statement that actually says something about the product, because that's our job – to make the strongest possible statement of our client's offering. That tends to worry committees.

So that first creative presentation can a real eye-opener for everyone involved. That's when the reality of the product and the project becomes apparent.

so you walk into the client call and...

Admit it, you spoiled creative ass. You hate feedback. You dread it. You loathe it. You know that even the least talented hack in the saggiest creative department in the city thinks that feedback is beneath him, and you don't think he's wrong. 

Maybe that's why most of you overreact to it. Even for relatively minor changes, creatives whip themselves into incensed states during the meeting. They vibrate with outrage. They become unable to speak coherently. They find their disgust smothered by account people before it squirts out like an exploding zit. They get back to their desks and throw paper in disgust, or staplers in anger. And when major revisions are required – well, if you remember the Old Testament story about the chained Samson bringing down the temple on his tormetors, you have some sense of the vibe.

All of which is stupid because it makes your work worse.

The impulse you feel (trust me, I've lived all of this) is spite. You'll give them exactly what they say they want. You'll take your brilliant concept and amazing writing down to the level they demand, and they deserve all the crap you're about to do for them... Except you really shouldn't. It's not good for your work, or your client, or your agency, or you.

I had... well, let's call him an opinionated client a couple of years ago. He started his job halfway through a major project we were doing, and he was rumoured to be a bear. Just before one of the first calls we had with him, which was to approve music tracks for the job, his underlings warned us that he considered himself to be something of a music expert. He knew everything about it. Gulp. And as he remained silent through all our reco'd tracks, our panic grew. Somehow, in spite of all our lurking despair, the subject of the '80s band Juluka came up. (I honestly couldn't tell you if it was mentioned by him or me.) It was slightly obscure, as no one else in the room was old enough to remember them, and it allowed us to start talking. We arrived at some common ground and we were able to rationally discuss what he wanted. Without (too much) rage.

As the weeks and projects went along, I found that talking directly to this key client was the only way to: a) get him to understand what I was after, and save much more of the spirit of our concepts; b) discuss things with the real decision maker, not minions; and c) feel much less rage. Email was useless, and calls with only the minions didn't help either.

You've got to engage, creatives. You can't be sulky or defensive. You can't fight. And you can't expect to keep absolutely everything intact. But you can simply talk about things and maybe keep the spirit of what you created alive. You'll have a better relationship with your clients. You might even stop thinking of them as being beneath you.

maybe this is why creatives have been known to have a pint every now and then

Yes, we offer outstanding strategically driven ideas to our clients, and when our client relationships are working we can feel like partners in their businesses.

But in direct and digital creative departments, there's one unalterable reality. After you sell that big cool idea to client and there is much congratulation and backslapping and you start thinking you're hot conceptual shit, you've still got to go back to your desk and make the damn thing.

You've got to put in long hours over a keyboard and mouse, work out a million details with your IA and tech folks, or wrestle with your print production manager about what Canada Post will let you do.

After the glory of the blue sky stuff, we have to become really good craftspeople. We need to know Flash and grammar and inDesign and how to proofread. We need to build insanely complex PhotoShop files showing in depth how something will animate, or write hundred-page copy decks full of not just brilliant content, but navigation and error messaging. We write forty letter versions for a package, or spend endless hours wrestling with iStock to find the one perfect image that may not exist. We don't get to outsource it to a studio, or a junior team or a production house. We have to get consumed with the details.

There are lots of folks out there who can competently handle execution no problem, but can only ever manage conceptual clichés. And there are a fair number of folks who are fantastic ideators (ugh, what a word) but who don't have the willingness or skills to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty for weeks at a time.

Craft is boring, executional and absolutely essential for what we do. We all know that great execution can almost save a bad idea, and bad execution can really sink a great idea. (The Diamond Shreddies stuff is a great example of bad execution. I know it won tons of awards, but for me it isn't anywhere near as good as it could be. Something seems really flat about the assembly line part, like the script and the direction just missed the point. And what's up with the mannequin at the end?)

All of which goes to demonstrate that the best direct and digital creatives have to have two almost contradictory skill sets, mind sets and purposes – free-ranging yet obsessive, outlandishly creative yet unerringly logical, accepting no boundaries but always being aware of them.

Okay, let's actually write the punch line, as if I needed to: good digital and direct creatives need two heads.

a pantload of writing advice

New book coming out that all writers need. Not just because if you're a writer you need to read a lot, but because it's about the folks who pretty much invented modern comedy.

For instance, Larry Gelbart is a name you should know. Why? Well, he not only created MASH for TV and wrote its first several (and best) seasons, but he also wrote Tootsie and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to The Forum and other stuff. (And Blame it on Rio, but we won't hold that against him.)

He also helped write Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, along with some punks you may have heard of named Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner and Woody Allen.

Larry was funnier than you'll ever be. He knew stuff that you and I need to learn.